Friday, July 9, 2021

Busy Week with the EURO 2021 and the Dynamics of Disasters Conferences

My Supernetworks group has been hard at work preparing for conferences that we will be speaking at. This Sunday the EURO 2021 Conference begins. It is a hybrid conference, based in Athens, and goes from July 11-July 14. On July 16, the 5th International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters begins and will last through July 18. It was originally scheduled to be in person and also in Athens, but has turned virtual. I am co-organizing the latter conference with Professors Kotsireas and Pardalos and Vogiatzis with great support from Sophia Paradaki.

Interestingly, back in the summer of 2019, I spoke at EURO Dublin and we organized also a Dynamics of Disasters (DOD) Conference, which took place in Kalamata, Greece! I blogged about the great Dublin conference, where many photos can also be found.  Please also check out my post on the DOD conference in Kalamata, which was a big success and we even edited a refereed volume, which was published by Springer.

The 2021 EURO Conference has a very busy and interesting program. I was delighted to be invited by Ruth Kaufman to give a lightning talk in the OR and COVID session in the Making an Impact Stream. The Making an Impact Stream I spoke at (on a panel) in Dublin and enjoyed the experience and discussions immensely. My lightning talk is entitled, "OR and COVID-19: From Research to Policy." Also, our latest work on game theory and disasters will be presented (the talk has been recorded by my PhD student, Mojtaba Salarpour, since it was placed in an invited session but at 5:30AM EDT). The presentation is based on a paper of ours published in the International Journal of Production Economics (IJPE) in 2021. We thank Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business for inviting us to speak in this Humanitarian Operations session that she organized for EURO 2021.


One can definitely see that we have been heavily engaged in research on various supply chain network themes in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Dynamics of Disasters Conference has an excellent line-up of plenary speakers: Professor Maria Besiou and Professor Oleg Prokopyev plus Dr. Stavros Siokos and Dr. George Karagiannis.

Our presentations at the DOD conference will include research done with Professors Deniz Besik and Pritha Dutta on food supply chains and disruptions in the pandemic; on convalescent plasma, based on a paper with Professor Pritha Dutta, recently published in Operations Research Forum, and on refugee migration networks - work done with Professors Patrizia Daniele and Ladimer S. Nagurney and based on a paper published in the Journal of Global Optimization. Mojtaba will also present our paper in IJPE presented at EURO 2021. I am looking forward to many interesting discussions and idea generation!




Looking forward to "seeing" many wonderful colleagues at these exciting conferences!